ly and wisely used. The social drink
customs are coming back again and a fresh education of the American
people as to the deadly drink evil is the necessity of the hour, and
that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and
from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this
reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram
seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly
failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only
had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop
before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is
successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly
enforces it. Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce.

The best method of prohibition is what is known as "local option,"
where the question is submitted to each community, whether the liquor
traffic shall be legalized or suppressed by public authority. Of late
years friends of our cause have fallen into the sad mistake of directing
their main assaults upon liquor selling instead of keeping up also their
fire upon the _use_ of intoxicants. Legal enactments are right; but to
attempt to dam up a torrent and neglect the fountain-head is surely
insanity. The fountain-head of drunkenness is the _drinking usages_
which create and sustain the saloons, which are often the doorways to
hell. In theory I always have been, and am to-day, a legal
suppressionist; but the most vital remedy of all is to break up the
demand for intoxicants, and to persuade people from wishing to buy and
drink them. That goes to the root of the evil. In endeavoring to remove
the saloon, it is the duty of all philanthropists to do their utmost to
provide safe places of resort--as the Holly-Tree Inns and other
temperance coffee houses--for the working people. And another beneficent
plan is for corporations and employers to make abstinence from drink an
essential to employment. My generous friend, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, when
he recently gave a liberal donation to our National Temperance Society,
said to me: "The best temperance lecture I have delivered was when I
agreed to pay ten per cent premium to all the employees on my Scottish
estates who would practice entire abstinence from intoxicants." The
experience of three-score years has taught me the inestimable value of
total abstinence; the benefit of the righteous law when it is well
enforce